The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM features a whole chapter about DOOM console ports and the challenges they encountered. The utter failure of the 3DO, the difficulties of the Saturn due to its affine texture mapping, and the amazing “reverse-engineering-from- scratch” by Randy Linden on Super Nintendo all have rich stories to tell.

Once heading towards disaster[1], the Playstation 1 (PSX) devteam managed to rectify course to produce a critically and commercially acclaimed conversion. Final DOOM was the most faithful port when compared to the PC version. The alpha blended colored sectors not only improved visual quality, they also made gameplay better by indicating the required key color. Sound was also improved via reverberation effects taking advantage of the PSX’s Audio Processing Unit.

The devteam did such a good job that they found themselves with a few extra CPU cycles they decided to use to generate animated fire both during both the intro and the gameplay. Mesmerized, I tried to find out how it was done. After an initial calling found no answer, I was about to dust off my MIPS book to rip open the PSX executable when Samuel Villarreal replied on Twitter to tell me he had already reverse-engineered the Nintendo 64 version[2]. I only had to clean, simplify, and optimize it a little bit.

It was interesting to re-discover this classic demoscene effect; the underlying idea is similar to the first water ripple many developers implemented as a programming kata in the 90’s. The fire effect is a vibrant testimony to a time when judiciously picked palette colors combined with a simple trick were the only way to get things done.

As we approach the end of 2018, I’m incredibly excited to announce that we at Serverless have a small gift for you: You can work with Amazon API Gateway WebSockets in your Serverless Framework applications starting right now.

But before we dive into the how-to, there are some interesting caveats that I want you to be aware of.

First, this is not supported in AWS CloudFormation just yet, though AWS has publicly stated it will be early next year! As such, we decided to implement our initial support as a plugin and keep it out of core until the official AWS CloudFormation support is added.

Second, the configuration syntax should be pretty close, but we make no promises that anything implemented with this will carry forward after core support. And once core support is added with AWS CloudFormation, you will need to recreate your API Gateway resources managed by CloudFormation. This means that any clients using your WebSocket application would need to be repointed, or other DNS would have needed to be in place, to facilitate the cutover.

I recommend you check out my original post for a basic understanding of how WebSockets works at a technical level via connections and callbacks to the Amazon API Gateway connections management API.

More and more, AWS customers want to make their applications available to globally dispersed users by deploying their application in multiple AWS Regions. These global users expect fast application performance.

In this post, I describe how to use Amazon DynamoDB to power the database of a global backend deployed in multiple AWS Regions. I use DynamoDB global tables, which provide a fully managed, multiregion, and multimaster database so that you can deliver low-latency data access to your users no matter where they are located on the globe.

Why use a multiregion architecture?

AWS customers typically want a multiregion architecture for two reasons:

One of the most common pains for users of AWS Lambda is cold starts. Cold starts add unwanted delays to Lambda invocations, and in cases where a Lambda is used inside of a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), the latency can be as high as several seconds. This practically negates the speed benefits of Lambda functions.

Fortunately, the Lambda team announced at AWS re:Invent 2018 that they are changing the architecture of Lambdas running in a VPC in order to reduce this latency and make Lambdas start much faster.

In plain English: So what the heck is Flutter and why is it a big deal?

Let me get this out there first: This article is meant to give you a general, extremely vague understanding of what Flutter is and why you should bother to care. It is absolutely not technical (or even technically correct) and it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to give you the general idea because you’re sitting there saying: “Why the heck is everyone is so worked up about this Flutter thing?”